Episode 222: Charlie McGonigal, the FBI & the Russians feat Mattathias Schwartz
Charlie McGonigal used to be the FBI's top NYC spy-hunter. His high rank, access to classified intel, and alleged work for Oleg Deripaska (of Russiagate infamy) means the story of MGonigal's charges could be one of the worst scandals in FBI history. We spoke to Mattathias Schwartz, the reporter for Business Insider who broke the story.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Mattathias Schwartz: https://twitter.com/Schwartzesque
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Music by Cosmic Cars. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to the 222nd chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Charlie McGonigal and the Russians episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Folks, I don't know if you noticed, but the news cycles of today just are not as exciting as they were during the Trump years.
Where's the Russian intrigue?
Where are the dramatic indictments?
Where's the naive insistence that powerful people will soon face justice?
Fortunately for those who got into the Mueller report, we've recently been treated to a tale of a crooked FBI agent.
Former counterintelligence officer Charlie McGonigal was charged for allegedly working with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
The indictments inspired a flurry of conspiracy theories alleging that McGonigal helped tip the 2016 elections in Donald Trump's favor.
To help us separate fact from fiction, we'll be talking with Matityas Schwartz.
He's a reporter who broke the story of the federal investigation into McGonigal last year.
We'll also discuss recent reassessments of how the press covered the Mueller investigation and supposed Russian influence operations.
Travis, how close to outright calling Russiagate a conspiracy can I get before you send your federal goons after me?
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
When I start making like a slicing motion across my throat, that means the goons are at the door.
Should probably hold back a bit.
I would say find a better signal.
That is so clearly a death threat.
I could use that against you in court.
Well, I was going to say that if it's a very slow, deliberate finger across the throat, that means you've already gone too far and Travis will kill you.
So yeah, I remember, I mean, I followed the Mueller investigation pretty closely when I should have been doing my actual work at my office during my day job.
So I remember I read like the Steele dossier when that was published.
That was very exciting, didn't really amount to much though.
I read all the indictments, I became familiar with how FISA warrants work.
And, you know, of course the investigation essentially concluded that while Russia interfered in the election through hacking and covert social media campaigns, and that the Trump campaign embraced the help and expected to benefit from it, there were no charges for any Trump associates for conspiring with Russians.
I actually made a custom Lego kit where I recreated the hotel room of the piss tape.
Oh.
And I had little figures doing stuff, you know.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
I had to find it on eBay, but there was a Playmobil set of Muller's Testimony.
Oh, yeah.
And it was great, and it came with everybody.
Little Adam Schiff.
Little Adam Schiff.
I didn't mean it like that.
I didn't mean it in a derogatory way.
It was perfect, brother.
Playmobil, all the guys are little.
They're the same size.
Very little.
Little gray hair.
Little guy.
Suit, tie.
Oh, boy.
They came with little plastic kind of manila folders that you would sort of spread out in front of them on the table.
So following that story, it left me, I think, pretty prepared to follow QAnon because a lot of early QAnon stuff was so much it was just a reaction to the Mueller investigation.
There was the Mueller white hat theory, which assured QAnon followers everything was going to be fine.
They often talked about the Flynn indictments and stuff, which you had to be familiar with from the news if you wanted to understand the Q drops.
That also gave me a taste for news that involves redacted documents and Cold War-style drama, so I was delighted to read Matt Schwartz's reporting on the Charlie McGonigal scandal.
I was chatting with him earlier and he seems eager to bat down misinformation that has cropped up around the story.
But before we talk to him, I thought we'd go over the broad outlines of what happened.
So, Charlie McGonigal, former head of counterintelligence for the FBI's New York field office, was charged in two separate indictments for allegedly working with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
And that's no good because Deripaska was sanctioned for interfering in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
McGonigal entered a plea of not guilty on charges in connection with violating U.S.
sanctions, conspiracy, and money laundering.
Prosecutors allege that McGonigal and Sergei Shestakov, a former Russian diplomat, violated U.S.
sanctions by digging up dirt on Deripaska's rival.
McGonigal is also charged with concealing connections he had with the person who decades earlier worked for an Albanian intelligence agency.
He allegedly received $225,000 in payments for that work.
Prosecutors allege that during several trips overseas to Albania, Austria, and Germany, McGonigal failed to disclose that he met with foreign nationals, including the Prime Minister of Albania and a Kosovar politician.
He was a good cop until they hit him with the Havana Ray.
And then, and then he was a crooked, dirty cop.
In one meeting, prosecutors alleged that McGonigal urged the Prime Minister of Albania to be careful about awarding oil field drilling licenses in Albania to Russian front companies.
The former Albanian intelligence employee who paid McGonigal had financial interests in the government's decision about the contracts.
The indictment also implies that, under McGonigal's direction, the FBI opened an investigation into a U.S.
citizen's foreign lobbying effort based on information he received from the former employee of Albanian intelligence.
McGonigal never disclosed his financial relationship with that man.
This activity proved to be very lucrative for McGonigal.
One of the cash payments, that was $80,000, was allegedly given to McGonigal while he sat in a parked car outside of a restaurant in New York City.
This is how I used to buy my weed, by the way, back in the late 90s, early 1000s.
You would sit in a Home Depot parking lot.
That was the parking lot of choice.
You would meet a guy named Johnny, whose name wasn't really Johnny, and you would get some pretty trash weed.
Yeah, I think car meetings are coming back.
Hoping, fingers crossed, car bombs are coming back.
No, no.
You know, I mean, this is a trope.
Only escapable ones.
This is a TV trope of the special agent's car blowing up right under his feet.
After McGonigal retired from the FBI in 2018, he was brought on as a consultant for a New York law firm working on Deripaska's sanctions.
McGonigal traveled to London and Vienna around 2019 to meet with Deripaska and others about getting the Russian oligarch delisted from the U.S.
sanctions list.
McGonigal and Shestakov attempted to hide their involvement with Deripaska using shell companies and forged signatures to receive payments from the Russian oligarch.
In 2021, McGonigal was allegedly working to obtain dark web files for Deripaska that he said could reveal hidden assets valued at more than $500 million and other information that McGonigal believed would be valuable to Deripaska.
But all that activity was ended abruptly in November of 2021 when the FBI seized everyone's electronic devices.
Oh man, they took away all their devices.
You know, I mean, this is kind of unfair.
You're basically fucking with a classic retirement plan for an FBI agent, you know?
Go full crooked near the end, only a couple years left, and then just go work full time as like a private intelligence guy for, you know, whatever, whoever will pay you.
Yeah.
Shit, we should hire our own FBI agent.
Maybe he could do something for the podcast.
What would you have our crooked FBI agent that we hired do first?
I don't know.
Sick him on all of my enemies?
Yeah, exactly.
Give me a list.
Let's go.
We are now joined by Mattathias Schwartz, a senior correspondent at Insider.
He broke the story of the federal investigation into McGonigal last year, and his reporting has offered the most detailed account of the affair.
His most recent report is headlined, The FBI's McGonigal Labyrinth, and it is real spy novel stuff.
Mattathias, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Really fascinating reporting.
Oh, happy to be here, Travis.
Thanks for having me.
So we've already covered some of the broad outlines of the story.
And before we go into the actual indictments themselves, I wonder if you could help us understand the cast of characters.
And we're going to start with Charlie McGonigal himself.
Now, I've read that part of what makes this case so shocking is that McGonigal was not a low-level agent.
So how would you characterize his career at the FBI?
So Charlie McGonigal had a incredible career at the FBI.
He's a super high ranking FBI official.
The final job he had before retiring was special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the New York City field office.
Now, that's a mouthful, but basically he was in charge of figuring out who all the spies in New York City were and what they were up to and whether they could be recruited to help the U.S.
somehow and just to gather intelligence in New York City, which is one of the world's spying capitals.
So he had access to all kinds of intel from across the U.S.
intelligence community.
He was doing stuff with NYPD.
He was leading a team of 150 guys who are all FBI special agents and doing this work of basically chasing and trying to flip spies.
Yeah, it was really fascinating the way you talked about the way that New York acted as a real intelligence hub, a global intelligence hub.
You make it sound a lot like there are shady meetings and deals and information being passed across fancy restaurants and streets and stuff.
Yeah, it's just really interesting.
Yeah, you've got all the money.
You've got the money.
You've got the United Nations, which is a huge spying hub.
I mean, being a diplomat all over the world is, for most countries, cover for a lot of intelligence operatives.
You've got all the heads of state who come in for the big UNGA meeting.
And then you've got Wall Street and finance and people from all over the world looking to hire financial services and park money in real estate.
So it's a lot, you know, there's a lot going on there under the surface.
And one of the fascinating things about this, this story for me is the way that we get these little glimpses of this kind of New York City shadow world.
People are calling it the new Vienna.
Yeah?
No, I don't know.
I just know Vienna also has that reputation.
I mean, it is like where everybody goes to spy on each other and... Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
And this is like, this, this gets us straight to Russiagate.
If you're, you know, if you're selling luxury condos in New York City, You know, for top dollar, of course, you're going to be dealing with Russians.
Of course, some of them are going to have ties to the FSB.
I mean, you can't it's not it's not necessarily deliberate.
I mean, that's just what that's part of what New York City is and has been for, you know, 10 or 15 years now.
Now, in your reporting, you spoke to a woman who had an affair with McGonigal, Alison Guerro.
She says that she was misled and didn't know that McGonigal was married.
And as you describe in your reporting, an affair for an FBI agent isn't a totally private matter.
Why is that?
Well, in theory, if not everyone knew about the affair, it's something that people who did know about it could use and hold over an FBI special agent as leverage.
This was, you know, one of the sticks that people pointed at Trump.
With the dossier or the Russia trip with the Miss Universe pageant that if he'd engaged in some sort of, you know, some sort of sexual activity, which was never proven, probably didn't happen.
But people were saying, oh, well, well, that would be compromised.
He would be compromised because he'd be so scared of it coming out.
And then FBI agents are subject to even stricter controls.
Every five years they have to take a polygraph.
Is my understanding.
And these kinds of personal matters, including, you know, potentially extramarital affairs are stuff that an examiner gets into in a polygraph.
Um, so, and this is also something that, uh, Charlie McGonigal given his position should have been really adept at knowing that this is something that foreign intelligence services could use to, you know, get leverage over, over you.
So, so he would have more of a reason to be careful than most.
Now, Alison Guerrero had a lot of ties to New York City law enforcement.
So he may have felt that she was sort of a trusted, trusted and vetted member of the circle he was already in socially.
So maybe he made a carve out in his mind for it or who knows.
Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean, it sounds like he was, McGonagall was lying to both his wife and his mistress, which seems like a bad idea when you're doing some like, you know, underhanded sanctions breaking activity with Russians.
Yeah, it's hard to know.
I mean, it could be just sort of like a classic updike, you know, midlife crisis kind of scenario where in his head he thinks that he might, you know, actually get divorced and so that's what he's telling the person.
You know, who knows what he thought at the time.
I mean, there's sort of a version of the story where he was, you know, being sincere enough in real time and only sort of deceptive to her in retrospect.
But this claim that Allison made that he lied to her and said that they were going to get married someday, a lot of people backed her up on that who I talked to, people who knew both of them.
And her dad backed her up on that too.
I talked to him and he said that, you know, that was his understanding that he'd actually met Charlie McGonigal.
So this is not just, you know, it's something she says, but it's not just hanging on her word.
You know, other people remember, remember this being the case at the time also.
The other main character in the story is the 55-year-old Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
And people who follow the coverage of the Mueller investigation are probably already familiar with Deripaska.
As you note in your reporting, Deripaska's name appears in the Mueller report 63 times.
A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Deripaska conducted influence operations and that he took direction on some of those operations from the Russian government.
So what is really relevant about Deripaska's background for the story?
So, as you're alluding to with the Mueller report, Oleg Deripaska is supposed to be the big bad wolf of Russiagate.
He is supposed to be the person that was as close as we got to collusion, which would have been the meeting between Konstantin Kilimnik and Paul Manafort at the Grand Havana Room, where Manafort, as he admitted to me, gave Kilimnik internal Trump campaign polling data.
And then Kilimnik, according to the intelligence community, passes this on to Deripaska and uses it to settle a debt that Manafort had to Deripaska or that Maniforce says Deripaska had to him, they had a dispute about money.
Now, and then if you believe the the United States Treasury Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee, you know, and I think they're due a certain amount of deference, Oleg Deripaska really is a bad guy.
They say he was You know, taking direction from the Kremlin, that he was involved in these influence operations, that he, I think, was involved in the murder of a businessman somehow.
Now, all the evidence backing this stuff up is classified.
We only get the conclusions.
But out of Russiagate, in the Mueller Report, you kind of get this, like, good and evil narrative, where you've got, kind of, James Comey hewing to the, you know, the righteous side, and then you've got Trump, who's this dirty double dealer who's mixed up with all these murderous Russians.
However, meanwhile, James Comey is actually appointing and handpicking Charlie McGonigal to lead the counterintelligence operation in the New York City field office.
And then you have Charlie McGonigal going on to take money from Oleg Deripaska.
So this allegation, which McGonigal has now been indicted for, really complicates this sort of good and evil binary where Trump is doing things that are beyond the pale, that no one would ever, ever think of doing.
And it really calls into question, well, how bad is Deripaska?
How abnormal was it to be doing business or having an association with him?
We know that in 2014, the FBI was actually trying to recruit Deripaska as an informant.
And as someone who's cast as a villain, Deripaska is very interesting because he's very insistent that he's not the big bad wolf.
And I've been corresponding with his press team quite a bit, and they asked for a lot of changes to the articles.
They say that none of these allegations are true.
And he's really interested in trying to like rehabilitate his image in the West.
You know, he's had real estate in London and New York and Washington that he's lost access to as as relations between the U.S.
and Russia have soured.
And he wants to try and get back into to the West's good graces and is trying to push back on all these things that the U.S.
government is saying about him.
And McGonigal, his hiring of McGonigal was part of this kind of full court press in 2018, right before the U.S.
sanctioned him, where Deripaska was basically just blasting out money, like hundreds of thousands of dollars to crisis communications guys, investigative firms, lawyers all across New York and London.
We're getting money from Oleg Deripaska to try and burnish his image The final main character in the story is Sergei Shestakov, a former Russian diplomat.
McGonigal, according to the Southern District of New York, was one of these people.
Now, the final main character in the story is Sergei Shestakov, a former Russian diplomat.
So what is his deal?
So Sergei Shestakov was the chief of staff to the Soviet Union's ambassadors to the United Nations.
So this is a guy, if he wasn't part of Russian intelligence, he certainly had Russian intelligence ties.
Now, I don't know how he first met Charlie McGonigal.
That's something I'm trying to report out.
I think it's a very interesting question, but eventually Shestakov becomes a US citizen and becomes a translator for the
Southern District of New York.
And then he becomes, and then at a certain point, he's acquainted with Charlie McGonigal.
And we know from Alison Guerrero's account that Shestakoff and McGonigal would have dinner.
And at these dinners, three or four times, Alison witnessed Sergei Shestakoff, the former
diplomat for the Soviet Union, handing Charlie McGonigal envelopes, manila envelopes that
look like they contained documents, not the kind of envelopes that would contain cash,
like a thin manila envelope.
Now what was in the envelopes?
We don't know.
Shestakoff is McGonigal's co-defendant.
So he was setting up.
Some of this business that McGonigal was alleged to have been doing with Deripaska.
He was kind of one of the go-betweens and who was also making money off of these deals with Deripaska and was connecting him with one of Deripaska's employees, a guy by the name of Evgeny Fokin, who runs one of Deripaska's companies in London or helps run it and also has reputed to have ties to Russian intelligence.
So, you know, if you sort of take a Russiagate type of lens, a Mueller report or Mado type of lens, you know, to this fact chain, as some people have, you would see like a vast, you know, Russian intelligence operation that had fully penetrated the FBI.
And that, you know, that's not impossible.
That's kind of like a worst case scenario here.
But, you know, McGonagall and Chesikov haven't been charged with espionage.
And we don't know exactly what was going on.
It's possible that everything in the envelopes was totally above board, but it looks, you know, from what we know, it's super sketchy.
Well, and also, you know, when you use names like, you know, connected to, like, the intelligence agencies and, like, you know, the secret meetings where, like, envelopes were exchanged, you know, the only, I mean, maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the only archetype I have for those kind of things happening is in, like, spy movies or, you know, a Tom Clancy video game or something.
And so it's really hard not to, you know, because in the movies, it's because everybody's guilty.
There is a conspiracy, you know, that's, you know, why the movie is exciting.
And so it's really hard to hear all of these names and these types of actions and the connections and not automatically just assume that it is leading up to what you said, the worst case scenario or the, or, you know, or in other words, the most exciting, uh, you know, scenario.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, another, another, you know, Perhaps more realistic scenario is that this was just sort of flirting and that they were trying to see or that, you know, Deripaska or one of someone
In McGonigal's world was trying to see how far they could push him and what they could get out of him.
And that, you know, it's possible that the U.S.
government got onto this and cut it off while it was still at first base or second base.
You know, the FBI has been pushing back on a lot of the reporting that's come out.
And they've been trying to say that, well, like it's not, it's not espionage.
It's just a case of greed, but it doesn't have to be one or the other.
It can, it can, it can absolutely be both.
So, I mean, if we can't, you know, jump to the worst case scenario right now, but what exactly is McGongall accused of actually doing according to the indictments?
So he's accused of taking, the biggest thing he's accused of doing is taking about half a million dollars in money from Oleg Deripaska through a sort of cutout corporation.
But after Oleg, this was in 2019, this is after Oleg Deripaska was sanctioned by the U.S.
government and it was illegal to take any money from him, which Charlie McGonigal who according to the indictments had seen some of the
underlying intelligence that led to Deripaska being indicted, no one would have known that better than Charlie McGonigal.
So he was taking money, a lot of it, from a Russian oligarch that was illegal for him to take.
He's also accused of lying on a bunch of his FBI paperwork about trips that he took to Albania and elsewhere,
where he said he was doing official business, but he had some unofficial business mixed in as well.
And he was also having his flights and his hotels comped by some of his business associates.
And he did not disclose any of this on his official FBI travel forms, so he's also charged with lying on these government forms.
Old McGonagall thought he was above the law, planning his retirement.
Yeah.
No, it's a little, it's a little strange, you know, like, uh, you know, what, what did he, did he think he could get away?
You know, it's, it's either very brazen or very stupid, or he thought he could just kind of like fix it somehow.
Or there were other people involved and he thought he was, it was above board.
Could he really be that dumb?
That's sort of like a question that a lot of, a lot of, I'm asking a lot of people have said, like, can he actually have been this dumb to have done this or, or, or does there have to kind of be something else here?
But no, I like the way you put it.
But I mean, yeah, if I've learned one thing from this podcast, you know, as long as we've been doing it, it's that you'll find that people, just because somebody is at a very high-ranking position in the government or law enforcement, does not mean that they can't also be incredibly dumb.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I guess here's the scary thing, right?
Is this what passes for normal in the FBI now?
Yeah.
What else did McGonigal witness that led him to believe that this sort of thing wouldn't attract notice?
Yeah, I mean, some of the pushback from the FBI is probably just trying to convince people that they are actually more airtight than they look from this.
Right.
I guess, yeah, I guess I would imagine it's like you say, like, you know, the head of counterintel at the New York field office looks like Man, this guy must be a master at OPSEC.
He must, you know, he must, like, you know, always make sure he's not being followed and locked down all his devices and not doing things that would, like, you know, make his romantic partners extremely mad at him.
But that wound up not being the case.
Yeah, yeah.
It does seem like you could make a good argument that this guy was, at a minimum, overpromoted.
Yeah.
I mean, that's sort of the best-case scenario, right?
But yeah.
Maybe he failed up like I have at most jobs, you know?
Yeah.
I always think about this kind of stuff that, you know, even though there is so much, you know, prestige, I think, assigned to a lot of these institutions, it's like still a job.
Like, you still have some co-workers who, like, you're cool with, some co-workers you're not.
You have ways that, you know, to kind of skirt around the rules if you've been there long enough, you know?
Uh, you know, somebody who, you know, if you're working at J. Crew, say, and, you know, guy across the street is working at Hollister, you can have lunch together and have a good, you know, it's, there's no, there's no love lost.
Plus, if you, you know, you're like, hey, I had a good career, you know, and this is not to say he was, you know, clean before this, but maybe he's like, eh, it's reaching the end.
Maybe I'll, you know, bank a couple millions from doing some shady stuff before I exit.
Yeah, this is what happened at the end of Training Day.
Well, not at the end of Training Day, but, like, it's one of the main plot points is that there's this senior detective who has essentially, like, done a really, like, dirty deal that's essentially gonna break him off, you know, enough money that he can sort of live for the rest of his life or go, you know, live somewhere tropical.
I mean, you know, same thing, basically, except he gets killed by Denzel Washington.
Yeah, like, Carlito's Way, too, right?
Like, it's like, one more.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
One more.
Just one and then I'm out.
So, basically, one more and then I'm out.
So basically we're blaming African-Americans and Hispanic people when really it's the Irish-Americans we have to worry about the whole time.
One of the interesting things that McGonagall is accused of doing is meeting with someone who worked for an Albanian intelligence agency and meeting with the prime minister of Albania.
And I have to confess, I don't quite know how Albania plays the geopolitics.
So why would they be interested in meeting with an ex-FBI agent?
Well, I think, you know, let me think about that for a second.
Why would high-ranking Albanians be interested in meeting with an FBI agent?
I mean, there's a lot of speculation about this in Albania right now.
Clearly, well, it seems from the indictments that McGonigal was holding himself out as like a high-ranking American US Intel official who knew a lot of stuff and could get stuff done.
He bragged once that to someone that he'd met Angela Merkel.
I don't know if that's true or not, but I mean, I think, you know, he, I think for, it's not, I wouldn't say the Prime Minister of Albania is like out of his league or anything.
And if he claims he can get stuff done, he probably would be, you know, like a person of interest.
It's possible that he met, he could have met the Prime Minister who, you know, in New York at one of these UN events.
I don't know if that, if that happened or not.
What's clear is that he had this Albanian friend in New York.
this guy, Agron Neza, who, according to indictments, gave him bags and bags of cash and kind of
served as his fixer for these Albanian meetings where he performed all kinds of different
services and lobbying, allegedly, for the Albanian prime minister in a circle.
I also sort of feel like if there's kind of like a dirty, like high-ranking FBI official
that other countries or other intelligence or whoever, kind of be like, "Oh yeah, well
There's this like kind of dirty guy who's like willing to get you and he's not afraid
to break rules.
I feel like you know that becomes a very attractive person that you want to meet to see if hey maybe there's something that can be done.
Yeah that's something I've wondered is you know reporting on this like if this guy had a shingle out there would have been like a real a pretty long line.
Yeah.
To get in on some of that if he was, like, delivering at all.
So, you know, is there more?
I think it's a question worth asking, you know, and it's possible that they have more.
It's possible the government knows more and they're holding it back because there's something that they want out of him for it, you know?
That's just a scenario.
Yeah.
My conspiracy theory is that the Albanians were trying to rehab their image after the Taken films, because these guys are portrayed as like, you know, child traffickers and all this stuff.
I mean, they're the bad guys consistently in every Taken movie, you know?
So maybe they were trying to rehab that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Travis, get us back on track.
So how did McGonagall Get caught.
I mean, how long was the FBI on to what he was doing?
Because like we said, despite the fact that he was supposedly a seasoned counterintel official, he didn't cover his tracks very well.
So what exactly did him in?
Do we know that?
I do know a little bit about that, and I did a bunch of digging into this question.
It turns out that in 2018, McGonagall went to London, and when he was in London, he met a high-ranking Russian who was under surveillance.
The British were already surveilling this Russian.
Now, this Russian may or may not have been Oleg Deripaska.
I don't know either way, but he was important enough for the British to be surveilling him.
McGonigal met with this person and then the British were alarmed.
And they were like, what's going on here?
We weren't informed of this.
And they called up the U.S.
Embassy and they said, what's going on?
And then the U.S.
was like, oh, we didn't, they didn't know about it.
So that, according to my reporting, was part of the reason, part of the predication for the FBI opening an investigation into McGonigal.
Now, McGonigal left the FBI in September of 2018.
We don't know if this meeting with the Russian happened before or after he left.
But it seems, from what I know, that the FBI needed this tip from the British in order to, that was, I don't know this for certain, but it seems quite likely that that was the first they heard that there might be an issue with this guy.
That's, I mean, that's kind of crazy.
I don't know.
It's like, again, you'd think he would know that this individual would be surveilled, considering his counterintel background, but I guess it was just one of the sloppy mistakes.
Yeah, no, no, it goes back to that same question.
Could he really have been this dumb, or is there something else going on here?
I mean, he does.
There is something in the indictments where he's doing a favor for one of the oligarch's associate's daughters.
And he explains to his supervisor, I'm doing this because I'm trying to recruit this guy as a source.
So maybe that was the story he was telling himself.
You know, just like he was telling himself, hypothetically, I'm gonna marry my girlfriend Allison and leave my wife.
He may have been telling himself, I'm not really going to work for the Russians.
I'm just trying to find out what they're all about so I can recruit them as a source as
a part of my work as a super spy.
I mean, that could have been, you know, one of the number of things that would be going
through his head.
But we know he eventually took the money.
He took half a million dollars from Deripaska illegally.
And before you do that as an FBI agent or as an ex-FBI agent, before you do something
illegal, you have to file a piece of paper with the attorney general and you have to
get someone from DOJ to sign off and say, OK, you can do this illegal thing because
it's part of your investigation for XYZ and we know about an advance.
So now your ass is covered.
He didn't do that.
So by the time he took this, this, this half a million dollars, he, he definitely, if indeed he did do that, it's just an allegation, but you know, he, he, that, that's really crossing a line.
You're not, you're not like trying to recruit someone anymore.
You're just getting paid.
Yeah, like, that can't be a real thing, right?
Where you would like, like, you would go to the DOJ, and they'd be like, oh, you know what?
Like, this would be a pretty good get for us, so you know what?
Enjoy!
That's a half a million dollar bonus.
Like, did that really happen?
Well, I don't think, I mean, I think hypothetically, maybe, like, they might sign off on a meeting.
Yeah.
But it doesn't seem like that happened.
Yeah.
There's no way they would let somebody get, you know, just like personally enrich themselves by doing something, you know, even if it did sort of further the agenda of the Bureau.
Right.
I mean, I'm sure something like that has happened, you would think, but I would assume they would put the money in escrow or something or give it back at the end of the process.
Let's hope.
Maybe this is me being a little bit naive, you know, in my, yeah.
Yeah.
Who knows how these things, you know, it's all pretty, it's all pretty arcane.
I know from another piece, actually, too, this is a different piece.
I was writing about someone who claimed to be a CIA asset, and they'd had some contacts with the CIA,
but they really wanted to make it seem like they were an operative,
and they wanted to use that as part of their legal defense, was my understanding, but the CIA can actually call DOJ,
and this happens sometimes, and they'll say, "This is one of our guys.
"Please don't charge him with this and that, "'cause he was doing it for us."
And this has happened before, they do it every so often.
But the guy I'm talking about was kind of full of shit.
It wasn't really true in this.
He didn't get one of these special get-out-of-jail-free cards.
But the card does exist.
That was the point of that anecdote.
There is a CIA get-out-of-jail-free card that does, from time to time, let people do, you know, bad things on an ends-justify-the-means basis, and then get charged, and then DOJ will agree to turn a blind eye to it if they feel like, on a cost-benefit analysis, that's what, you know, ought to happen.
That makes sense to me.
Sorry, I feel like this is turning into like Lawfare or something.
Are you kidding?
No, I have like a thousand questions.
I have to like, I have to like actively mute myself to make sure Travis gets his questions in.
Just fascinated, fascinated by all this in the same way that most people are.
You know, it is like a real world sort of spy story and and everything that that entails.
Yeah, no, I mean, people at this level just aren't supposed to get caught.
I mean, that's the one reason why this has gotten so much attention.
Whatever they're doing, we're sort of never supposed to learn about it.
Right.
And something in the order of things broke down here, and everyone's trying to kind of figure out exactly what that was.
This case has sparked a lot of conspiracy theories.
It's also inflamed a lot of partisan grievances over the 2016 election and subsequent investigation into the Trump campaign.
So, I was hoping you can help us clarify what is and is not known about the case.
You mentioned that, for example, that we can't rule out the possibility that there's some sort of espionage component to this case.
But, I mean, is there any reason to believe that or is that pure speculation at this point?
I mean, it is pure speculation at this point, but it's not the craziest speculation.
We know from the indictments that McGonigal met with Deripaska in Vienna and in London.
That's stated in the indictments.
And if he talked to Deripaska about any classified information, including this is the classified intelligence, which is the reason that you might be sanctioned or have been sanctioned, Mr. Deripaska, that would be espionage.
He would be, I believe, at least that's my understanding, that could be construed as espionage.
classified information to someone who's like a, you know, an agent of a foreign government,
according to the Treasury Department. So it's not, it's speculation, but it's not like the
biggest leap. But maybe when you say espionage, you're meaning more like, I'm like performing
queries for Vladimir Putin direct into the FBI database and handing the envelopes or something
like, I mean, that's a, that would be a bigger leap. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Cause like, I was like, there's some precedent for like an FBI agent, like being
like a double agent for Russian intelligence.
There's a case like Robert Hanson, who was convicted in 2001 of that crime, and he is going to spend the rest of his life in, you know, a supermax prison for that.
That's a very, very serious charge.
But McGonagall, he was released on half a million dollars bail.
So doesn't that suggest that he's not really that much of a flight risk?
So he's not under threat of that kind of like serious prison time?
Yeah, no, a lot of folks who know a lot more about the federal justice system than I do have said that the fact they let him out on bail means that they don't feel like they've got, you know, they don't think there is an espionage risk here.
It's just a very, very hard scenario to completely rule out.
I would really want to know a little more about his relationship with Shestakoff before I rule it out personally.
This is just me in my own tinfoil hat.
But it's very possible that they let him out on bail because they wanted to see where he was going to go walk to, who he was going to have coffee with, and they didn't want to, you know, they wanted to like keep observing him in the wild, so to speak, because they had their own questions.
The government had their own questions.
They felt that It would be easier for them to get answers with him out.
But I think, yeah, we don't know that it was espionage and it's reasonably likely that he was just being kind of groomed and his various patrons were seeing how much mileage they could get out of him for how much money.
And that there was a risk that something might happen in the future, but that nothing had happened yet.
That's a, that's a very, you know, defensible way of, you know, kind of looking at what we know.
Yeah.
I mean, the other thing that was kind of, like, confusing to me, or less unclear to me, was who exactly, I guess, McGonagall was serving in his relationship with Deripaska.
Because like you mentioned, Deripaska has his own particular business interests.
He wants to, like, you know, become Have a better image of the West.
You know, he's described as being a member of Putin's inner circle, but he's also like kind of strayed from the official state line in some ways.
For example, he's criticized the invasion of Ukraine, which has cost him in Russia.
But I mean, that naturally raises the question.
So, I mean, did McGonigal's relationship with Deripaska make him an agent of the Kremlin or merely an agent of Deripaska's personal business interests?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
It raises the question, going back to the Manafort-Kalimnick meeting, is Konstantin Kalimnick actually a Russian spy?
Should we take the U.S.
government at their word That he is an asset of the Kremlin, because that's all we really have to go on.
They haven't given us the underlying evidence of Deripaska's Kremlin ties or Kalemek's Kremlin ties.
And Deripaska, it seems, is somewhere in the middle, and his views on Russia have moved around over the years.
And clearly in 2014, the US thought he was close enough to us that we should take a shot at trying to win him over.
Now, that didn't work, but it's, yeah.
We don't we don't that's that's a really big question here like what was McGonagall paid for according to the indictments it was for Opposition research on one of Deripaska's rivals.
And that's something that Deripaska does a lot.
He hires law firms and due diligence firms to try and gain leverage on his various business partners because he feels like he's not getting enough money out of them or whatever.
And it could very well have been, you know, nothing more than that.
There could be no, you know, Kremlin aspect to it at all.
It could entirely be like a private business matter with someone who, you know, our government said it's illegal to do any business with.
I want to ask you about the alleged involvement that McGonigal had in Crossfire Hurricane.
This is the FBI counterintelligence investigation in 2016-2017 that looked into whether Trump and members of his campaign were working with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
So, I did read that according to the DOJ Inspector General's report on the FISA applications of Carter Page, McGonigal was involved in forwarding the tip from the Australians to DC headquarters regarding possible Russian involvement in the Trump campaign.
So, given that, is there any reason to believe that he influenced the FBI investigation in a malicious way?
There's no evidence that he influenced the FBI investigation in a malicious way.
He was, as you've laid out, kind of present at creation for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and handled this essential incoming tip from an Australian diplomat about George Papadopoulos that, at least according to the official version of Crossfire Hurricane, This is when the FBI really started looking at Trump's Russia ties.
So he is kind of like this Zelig-like figure, McGonigal, like popping up at these like crucial points in the Russiagate saga.
But there's nothing to suggest that he, you know, threw the case for a loop or sabotaged it in any way.
My understanding is he did not have any kind of role in Mueller's team.
You know, Mueller had a whole team of people who were grinding on this for years.
And I don't think McGonigal, had he If he had been tasked with sabotaging Crossfire Hurricane, which I don't think he was, I don't think he would have been capable of doing so.
If you look at just how much scrutiny was applied to Trump-Russia for years and years and years, it would take much more than one guy to derail that and to keep the people who are digging on that from finding whatever they wanted.
I mean, the amount of paper you can see is from Jason Leopold's FOIAs, the number of FBI 302 forms.
Thousands and thousands of pages and labor and like, you know, he had a job to do in the meantime.
So I don't think this idea of him being a Russian plant that we would have gotten, we would have pinned down Trump collusion, but for Charlie McGonigal, I think is a pretty, pretty, pretty silly hypothesis.
Yeah, I mean, he already sounds super sloppy, even just going into this.
You know, we've been talking about this, you know, almost the entire episode, how it's like, was he really this dumb?
So, yeah, it's hard for me to believe, at least, that a guy who was so sloppy in this other way was, you know, the mastermind who, like, never got caught somehow in, like, derailing all of Mueller's, you know, lawyers and researchers and all of that.
Well, I think, I mean, there's a lot of people who are really emotionally invested in the Trump-Russia narrative and who were unsatisfied by Mueller's report, were unsatisfied on where the facts are landed and are sort of desperately looking for that missing piece that will allow them to provide some evidence to support with what they believed all along.
Which is that Trump is some sort of witting Russian agent who takes his orders directly from the Kremlin, which is a hypothesis that some people just simply will not let go of.
I mean, that's one thing about McGonagall.
The story that's interesting to me is that people are willing to go to such lengths to use him to try and make that true when it's just such a stretch.
It is, yeah.
A lot of like, you know, serious people have made some really kind of crazy accusations that McGonagall may have actually like harmed the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Like you mentioned in your story, this was kind of insinuated by Timothy Snyder, Yale historian.
There's also a lot of insinuations made by Senator Whitehouse in a letter to Attorney General Garland.
So, Jake, could you read this letter, please?
Yeah, absolutely.
Because McGonigal was the special agent in charge of the FBI's New York field office counterintelligence division in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, he may have knowledge or have participated in political activities to damage then-candidate Hillary Clinton and help then-candidate Donald Trump.
For instance, during that time period, Rudy Giuliani announced that a, quote, big surprise related to Secretary Clinton would be forthcoming from the FBI, hinting he received that information from the New York field office.
The very next day, Director James Comey, reportedly bowing to internal pressure from that office, broke the FBI's ordinary policy of declining to comment on ongoing matters close to an election and announced that the FBI would reopen its investigation into Secretary Clinton's use of a private email server in light of the discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner's
laptop. I feel like I've stepped into a time machine that is taking me back right into 2016 all
over again. Yeah, so yeah, Senator Whitehouse, he doesn't make any outright allegations there, but what do
you make of like the insinuations there that he was like possibly responsible for the Giuliani
leaks? Well, I may have been inadvertently responsible for pouring some gas on this because Alison
Guerrero, who's the big source for a lot of the, you know, not my only source, but
it's like her account is kind of the spine of a couple of the longer stories I wrote.
She has a relationship of some kind with Rudy Giuliani, they're friends.
Um, and they've known each other for a while and people have used that to sort of make a leap and assume that, that, okay, well then she must've been the one who leaked This information, you know, must have come from McGonigal.
I really don't think that's true.
Just kind of having been immersed in the texture of this up close.
I mean, one thing to keep in mind with Giuliani is, you know, he worked, you know, he worked for the Southern District of New York.
He was the mayor.
He's been in New York law enforcement circles for decades.
The number of contacts he has at the New York City field office,
which has 2,000 employees.
I mean, he doesn't need a Charlie McGonigal.
He's got dozens and dozens of guys that he's close to.
I mean, I think the Inspector General found that four FBI agents had been, you know, in touch with his office at various times.
I think they found that through phone records.
So it's not impossible that McGonigal was the source of the leak.
I just think it's very, very, very unlikely.
And Allison's account, Allison's a very pro-Trump MAGA person who still believes, you know, we have some substantial disagreements about how the last election turned out, you know, among other things.
But, you know, she gave me an account of McGonigal's politics and his politics seem pretty, you know, pretty lukewarm.
He doesn't seem to be so pro-Trump or pro-Hillary.
He did not strike her as like a political firebrand.
Now, of course, she could just be telling me that because this whole thing is some sort of op Uh, and I'm just incredibly naive and believe everything I'm told and don't, don't, don't check it all.
But a lot, a lot of, you know, the important aspects of her account to me, they, they did check out.
And I think she's telling me the truth.
And I don't think that McGonigal, from what I can tell, was interested in putting his finger on the scale politically on one way or the other.
Well, it also doesn't seem like anything McGonigal did either forced or prevented the FBI from announcing that they were opening that investigation in the first place.
So that that information would have come out anyway.
So yeah, yeah, no, no, I haven't.
You know, that's that's that's right.
That's right.
Yeah, it's a super fascinating story.
I'm sure it'll keep unfolding in the coming months and years.
But I also wanted to get your perspective on Russian influence operations because you also reported about a Russian troll farm based in Mexico.
You discovered the details of a company called Social CMS, which is actually run by a Russian warlord named Yevgeny Progozin.
And he happens to be the guy who founded the notorious Internet Research Agency in St.
Petersburg.
Briefly, so what did you discover about the operations of SocialCMS?
So at Insider, working with some other publications, including Politico and this German newspaper Welt, we got this vast, vast tranche of documents from inside of Purgosian's operation.
And they showed us, you know, there are letters between that he sent to Bashar Assad during the Syrian war, asking for medals for his Wagner Group mercenaries, there are requests for rebates on cargo ships that he purchased for the Russian Navy, and there are all these detailed budgets and invoices for influence operations around the world, including subcontractors in Mexico.
So I was actually able to get on the phone With someone who had unwittingly been one of these Purgosian influence operation subcontractors and was posting on to Instagram about feminism, about Hispanic positive thinking memes, about Black Lives Matter during the run-up to the 2020 election.
And then the FBI got onto this and shut it down shortly before the election.
They let Facebook know about it and Facebook shut it down.
But this whole story kind of goes against the prevailing kind of like Matt Taibbi, Twitter files, where like, there's no such thing as foreign interference.
And whenever the government and big tech are working together, they're plotting to do evil and snuff out free speech.
Now, I think some of the Twitter file stuff has been quite useful, especially Lee Fang's report about, you know, what the Department of Defense was doing in the Middle East.
With, you know, using inauthentic accounts to spread pro-American propaganda, essentially.
However, this doesn't mean that there aren't actually, like, bad people out there using the internet to do bad shit, and that the government is within its rights to put their foot down sometimes and, you know, tell the platforms what they've discovered.
That's clearly what happened here.
I don't know, did that answer your question?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really fascinating.
I mean, it is really interesting to hear about the continuation of these Russian operations
in like, you know, 2020 and beyond, because it seems like we're in the middle of like
a kind of reassessment of what exactly happened with regards to Russian influence and Russian
operations in 2016.
And this has come first and foremost in the form of this massive 24,000 word report in
the Columbia Journalism Review of the media's reporting on alleged Trump-Russia links.
So the report is very controversial, not very flattering to the press.
It talks about, for example, the press's overly credulous treatment of the Steele dossier, which made a lot of sensational claims about Trump and Russians, which turned out to be either inaccurate or unverifiable.
So I'm curious, you know, as someone who like breaks stories related to these Russian operations, what do you make of that CGR report and the reporting that was done during the Mueller investigation?
The reporting, I'm sorry, the reporting that was done during the Mueller, oh you mean like the what the media was doing during the Mueller investigation?
I just want to understand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think the the CJR piece, I liked it.
I think it got a lot of important things right and they were things that no one said yet.
One is just the role of Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS.
This guy was everywhere in 2016.
The number of high-level meetings he had with top editors at every brand name publication. I'm
not going to say the specific names but I know this you know first hand second hand that
guy was spreading a ton of stuff and had a massive footprint on how Trump was covered.
And no one's really, you know, until I read the CJR piece, I had not seen anyone pin the tail on the donkey.
Another thing that Girth gets right is the Russian narrative and the Cambridge Analytica narrative.
They were good business for the media.
People ate them up.
And the media has been shifting, and me being part of the media, to a traffic-based model where you give the people what they want.
People love these stories, and I think the people's appetite for this particular set of facts, and also a certain amount of speculation, that influenced the coverage.
And I think Gerth is right about that.
The decision to publish the dossier was incredibly consequential, and it led to all kinds of ripple effects in Trump's psychology, Trump's relationship with the FBI, and it's kind of insane that that document was ever taken seriously by anyone. Now
at the same time, I don't think the Gertz story says that the Russiagate thing was a total
scam. I certainly don't think it was.
I mean, the Clinton-McManuford meeting is very concerning and pretty inappropriate and pretty
shocking that you would have the head of a major candidate's presidential campaign having a private
off-the-books meeting with a guy who, you know, is alleged at least to have links to Russian
intelligence and is handing him internal data. That really happened and that is not good.
Also the DNC hacks, which, you know, are alleged to have been done by Russian intelligence,
those had a real impact.
I know that there are people who would probably disagree with me about this, but I was at the DNC in 2016.
The Bernie people were really mad because of material in those hacks.
And those hacks really did kind of fuck up the convention and change the tone for the rest of the race.
So when people say, oh, you know, Russia only spent this small amount of money on Facebook ads, they didn't really get that many impressions.
They're sort of ignoring the hack and leak component of it that I think really did have a big impact.
Yeah, you know, actually, I mean, I do agree that the hack and leak component was much more consequential than some of the other stuff they're talking about, especially like the social media operations, which got a lot of press.
Because, you know, I think, you know, once you solve the mystery of, like, what these foreign influence operations did on social media, You haven't yet solved the mystery of what the ultimate consequence or what the ultimate result is, because that's a separate question.
At first glance, it seems like in 2016 these operations were massively influential.
I'm thinking of one Twitter account specifically.
It was called 10GOP.
I think it was the biggest, most famous one.
It was run out of the Internet Research Agency.
And it got over 100,000 followers.
It was retweeted by people in Trump world like Kellyanne Conway, Michael Flynn.
It wound up even getting mentioned by a bunch of mainstream outlets as if it was a legitimate account.
But more broadly, there was a recent study published in the journal Nature, which concluded that Russian Twitter accounts didn't really affect how people voted.
Now, that study is called That's just one platform.
to the Russian Internet Research Agency for an influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016
U.S. election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior. It found that Russian
influence operations on Twitter in that election reached relatively few users, most of whom
were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact
in changing minds or influencing voter behavior. So, that's just one platform. It doesn't
take into account, for example, Facebook, which is a much larger platform. I think the
Facebook operations were kind of more interesting that way.
One of my favorite stories about Russian influence in the 2016 election is that two Russian-run Facebook pages organized competing rallies outside of an Islamic center in Houston.
So there was a Russian-controlled Facebook group called Heart of Texas that advertised a rally to Stop Islamification of Texas in May of 2016.
And there was a separate Russian-sponsored group called United Muslims of America, which advertised a Save Islamic Knowledge rally for the same place and time.
And sure enough, there was two competing protests on that day.
So, I mean, I would disagree with anyone who argues that the impact of, like, these operations is zero.
But it's just, according to this study, at least, on Twitter, the Internet Research Agency mostly succeeded in creating more content for the right-wing echo chamber.
Now, obviously it's not easy to determine the impact of like social media campaigns, but what do you think is the ultimate result of, you know, these kinds of campaigns conducted by internet research agency and social CMS?
So when we think about the impact of this Russian influence operations, we also know the Russians were like probing voter rolls and voter systems.
And I think one, you know, one scenario I've heard, you know, from, from smart folks is that maybe they wanted to be discovered doing this.
Maybe all they wanted to do.
was call into question the legitimacy of the democratic process and the legitimacy ultimately of, well, Trump won.
But then a lot of people still don't accept that that was true.
And then you get an even, you know, sort of bigger echo of that in 2024.
I'm sorry, in 2020, where you've got, you know, Trump folks just making stuff up about the result.
But I think the biggest impact of the 2016 operation Was really leaving this question of Trump's legitimacy unsettled.
So many people had so much vested in Clinton winning.
So many important, powerful people knew what how they would benefit and what their next job would be.
And those people all needed a story.
That they could agree on for why Trump had not won on the merits.
And Russia provided a way to do that.
Now, that doesn't mean that there was no there there.
That doesn't mean that there wasn't an internet research agency.
But it does explain why this narrative caught fire and was so, you know, instantly adopted by a very diverse and vocal group that suddenly found themselves cast out of power and was angry about it.
One thing that really influenced my thinking about these influence operations came from a New York Times report published in September of last year.
It was on these operations that attempted to create divisions in the Women's March movement.
And that report included a passage that I think articulated the challenges of assessing these kinds of operations.
Now, could you read this for me, Jake?
It is maddeningly difficult to say with any certainty what effect Russian influence operations have had on the United States, because when they took hold, they piggybacked on real social divisions.
Once pumped into American discourse, the Russian trace vanishes like water that has been added to a swimming pool.
This creates a conundrum for disinformation specialists, many of whom say the impact of Russian interventions has been overblown.
After the 2016 presidential election, blaming unwelcome outcomes on Russia became, quote, the emotional way out, said Thomas Ridd, author of Active Measures, The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare.
It's playing a trick on you, said Dr. Ridd, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
You've become a useful idiot if you ignore effective info ops.
But also, if you talk it up by telling a story, if you make it more powerful than it is, it's a trick.
I thought that was really interesting because I think a lot of well-meaning people act as if caution or skepticism or even nuance about the impact of influence operations, foreign influence operations, is equivalent to covering for them.
As if you're helping these disinformation or division campaigns by suggesting that they might not be the only reason that half the country voted for Donald Trump.
But here is like the guy who literally wrote the book on Russian active measures saying that if you overstate their effectiveness, Then, really, you're the one who are helping the Russians, because you're helping people think that these campaigns are massively successful, regardless of how successful they are in reality, because, you know, really, it just furthers their goal of sowing this paranoia and division.
I guess, what do you think about, like, you know, what comes with the risk of, like, you know, exaggerating the effectiveness of these campaigns?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I think he makes a good point.
There's a certain risk there.
And I think, you know, how are you ever going to be able to... There's sort of this, this sort of ideal of, you know, what a US presidential campaign would be like in the absence of a globalized media environment, where you had an impenetrable firewall, where no one who is Not a US citizen, their opinion would somehow be automatically silenced because of its provenance.
But we're never going to, if that were ever true in the past, I mean, I don't think we're ever going to get back there.
I mean, it's like, I think the swimming pool analogy is exactly right.
So this is just.
Something I mean people are gonna have to get smarter somehow and you know about this or they're or or they're just gonna make you know dumb decisions on the basis of the information that's been spoon-fed to them by whoever's holding the spoon and trying to you know litigate.
I mean I think I think the way let me say this I think the way this um Pragosian Mexico operation was handled by the FBI was actually pretty smart.
They shut it down before the election, before it got too big, without a lot of hullabaloo.
They didn't say, we've caught the giant Russian influence operation.
They just noted it very briefly in like the 16th paragraph of some ODNI report that came out later.
And then Facebook noted it in this like internal report, but they took it down, but they also didn't make too big a deal of it, which is, which is kind of a happy median.
I mean, I think, I think, you know, in 2016, I think the surprise of Trump's victory You know, coincided with this huge worry inside the Obama administration that they hadn't done enough beforehand, um, because they didn't know that it was going on, but they, but then, and then there was this temptation.
I mean, James Clapper, General James Clapper says this in his memoir.
I mean, a lot of people think a lot of people put their flag in the ground and said that the Russian interference was decisive in 2016.
And if you, if, if, if that's your view, then you, you as a consequence, you don't think Trump's like a legitimate president.
And that, that leads to all of these, all these knock on effects.
So I think the surprise.
of Trump's victory and the discovery of that there was a Russian influence operation, you know, led to kind of like this almost like perfect storm in 2016 that we still haven't found our way back from.
Right, like it's way better that there were an overwhelming amount of people that looked at Donald Trump and said, yes, that's who I want to be president.
Yes.
And then it happened, you know, despite all of the coverage sort of, you know, essentially saying, you know, this is a slam dunk for Hillary Clinton.
You know, moving beyond that, it's much easier to go like, well, of course he never would have won if it hadn't been for all of these illegal sort of operations.
It's way easier to hold on to than like, oh, my candidate, like, Maybe didn't campaign as good as they should have or, uh, you know, or, or our country is that fucked up that they're willing to put somebody like Donald Trump in office.
Yeah, no, no, I think, yeah, no, it's a, it's a easy...
Just putting it on the Russians, it's an easy way to avoid looking at the questions that you're raising there.
You made a really good point about the DNC hack and how in a lot of ways, you know, that did a lot of damage because people saw internal messages from the campaign.
That stuff, you know, ended up in Pizzagate.
It got baked into, you know, into what ultimately became QAnon down the line.
It also showed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC at large were, you know, Essentially sabotaging, maybe is the hard word, but sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Yeah, getting the whole AP to call it early.
I think there was more on that in the emails, too, and that was a little funny.
The question was, is what always like really weirded me out, and it might just be because I don't understand how this stuff works, but I always thought it was weird that the DNC, you know, because if that was, yes, indeed a Russian hacker, then that would amount to massive Russian, that would be a thing that came from Russian hackers or some kind of order from the Kremlin that I think did have a substantial impact on, you know, your voting population.
So that's why I always thought it was very strange that, you know, the DNC rebuffed You know, the request from the FBI to actually get their hands on the servers.
There was this whole right-wing narrative that was, you know, the DNC had hired this third-party analyst, CrowdStrike, and that because CrowdStrike, you know, because they were the ones who only got their hands on the server, you know, they doubted whether, you know, the hack actually had come from Russia.
I mean, I don't know if it matters who Who actually did the hack and then leaked it?
Because I think the results were the same.
But am I wrong?
Did we ever get any more information about that, that the FBI or law enforcement did actually get the servers and could verify that it was in fact a Russian source, Guccifer 2.0 or whatever?
No, this is like a great question.
And let me just like, if I can jump back for a second, please, just because Jim Jordan is talking about something doesn't mean necessarily that we shouldn't pay attention to it.
I think this is a common fallacy among reasonable people.
So things like fusion GPS and also a gain of function research with, um, you know, with the origin of COVID, these are things that, uh, are worth obsessing about.
They also happen to be things that Jim Jordan is obsessing about.
And they're worthy of scrutiny.
And just because unserious people happen to be scrutinizing them, that doesn't invalidate the proposition that we're thinking about.
But you asked specifically about CrowdStrike.
This is something I flagged too.
I have never had the chance to go deep on.
Do we know?
That the Russians hacked the DNC for sure or was it just random hackers?
My understanding is that does indeed hang on CrowdStrike's assessment and CrowdStrike was being paid by the DNC.
Now I believe If I'm not mistaken, there are people who have been charged by the Department of Justice who are from the GRU with doing this hack, if I remember right.
But that doesn't make it true either.
So did the Russian government hack the DNC?
I mean, probably.
Do I know for sure?
I don't feel like I do, and it's the sort of thing, I think you're right, that I'd love to see Someone go deep on and ask, well, how do we really know that that's who's behind this?
Now, there's also this sort of like, that can be taken too far with the whole sort of like, just asking questions.
Or tying it to the Seth Ridge murder.
Right.
Which is really what it was done in conspiracy circles.
That information was used to connect this leak to Seth Ridge.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, I don't know.
No, you're completely right.
So, like, at what point... I mean, that's one thing that's so hard, you know, that I think that your show is about, too.
At some point, you have to trust someone.
If you're just totally skeptical of everything and are always looking for someone's, you know, past connections to sort of, you know, invalidate what they say on some ad hominem basis, You're just going to wind up nowhere and believe that nothing at all is true.
And in order to develop some sort of operating understanding of how the world works, you have to pick, okay, this is the set of evidence from this set of people who I'm going to believe.
But it's really hard, especially when you see things going on.
Like, you know, like the way the COVID origin narrative has changed, the way the Trump is a Russian agent quote-unquote narrative, you know, has changed.
It just, you know, it's not, there's no clear roadmap for, you know, who you should be getting stuff from on any particular issue.
It's extremely risky and it's a huge, the whole process is a huge headache and I don't blame anyone who just wants to throw up their hands and be like, I don't want to Any part of this.
The Kalimnick one, it's funny.
The, the, the Manifort-Kalimnick thing.
That's the one, for some reason, I really, I've really taken the stand that Kalimnick is some kind of Russian agent or has ties to Russian intelligence.
But why have I done that?
I guess I believe it's true.
It's, I mean, our government has said that it's true.
Uh, but I ping them and they won't, they don't explain how or why that they think it's true.
And, and, you know, I wish they would, but yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's, it's hard to escape The possibility that like Manafort and sort of McGonagall, that there's not necessarily like a big difference there.
It could just be guys meeting with, you know, other guys trying to do some kind of deal.
And there could be nothing more to it than that.
It's just really, really, really hard to know.
And they might not even know in the moment.
I mean, that's kind of how it's different from the spy version movie is that I think, you know, when these relationships are unfolding in real time, there's a lot of, there's a lot of ambiguity about who's recruiting who, who's working for who, you know, and both sides are kind of feeling the other out.
And then the, you know, and then you can kind of like put a frame around it and call it a conspiracy in retrospect based on, on stuff that happens later.
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Matt.
Where can people find your work?
So folks can find my work at Business Insider.
That's businessinsider.com.
And I also have written a series of profiles of senior officials for the New York Times Magazine, where I sit down and talk to these guys for an hour, hour and a half or so.
You can go back and look at those.
There's Bill Barr, James Clapper.
That one was for GQ.
John Brennan.
That's probably my favorite one of these.
And Mike Pompeo.
And then I also give a soup-to-nuts account of Comey and Trump and their face-off.
But Business Insider is where I work, it's where I'm writing about McGonigal, and you can also follow my tweets at Schwartz-esque.
That's just Schwartz, E-S-Q-U-E.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and sub for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode for every main one plus access to our entire And if you are already a subscriber, thanks so much.
for watching.
Listener, until next week, may the mechanicals bless you and deep... Wait.
And deep you?
And deep you.
And deep you.
No, I think that's good.
That's it.
Final take.
Good.
Perfect.
Who cares, right?
Who cares?
TPU?
All right, I'll do it good.
No!
No, this is all in.
If you want to keep talking, I mean, we can have this last longer at the end of the episode, but this is way funnier than you getting it right, so... It's a jewel.
This is a jewel.
Bless you and keep you.
There's it right for the editor, just in case.
Sneak it in at the last.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
The FBI guy after me for the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, long before my election as president, was just arrested for taking money from Russia, Russia, Russia.
